
The iPad doesn't seem to be a hit with customers. Here is a nice compliation. Enjoy! IPad with bleeding edge technology:
2X the information
Oprah has decided to move to cable and suck more money out of her loyal fans. You can watch some video clips on http://www.oprah.com/ but now you will need cable and the Oprah Network channel.Most everyone is familiar with shellac as a wood-finishing product. It's often used to give furniture, guitars and even AK-47's that special shine. But did you know it is also commonly used as a food additive? Yep, that's why those jelly beans you gorge on every Easter are so shiny.
But what exactly is shellac?
Are you sure you want to know?
Shellac is derived from the excretions of the Kerria lacca insect, most commonly found in the forests of Thailand.
The Kerria lacca uses the sticky excretion as a means to stick to the trees on which it lives. Candy makers use it to make those treats you love so much shiny and beautiful. Then you eat them. The insects that is.
You see, the process used to harvest the Kerria lacca excretion is a pretty simple one. They just scrape that shit right off the tree. Unfortunately for you and your future enjoyment of shiny candies, this leaves little room for quality control measures to guarantee that the insects themselves aren't scooped up also.
Before some health nut out there pipes up to tell us they don't eat candy, we'd like to point out that, during the cleaning process, apples lose their natural shine. Care to guess how it's restored?
If all of this is making you a bit queasy, we understand. It's not every day that you find out you've been celebrating the resurrection of Christ by consuming handfuls of insect-infused treats your entire life. But before you head to the medicine cabinet, consider this. That pill you want to take to quell your nausea? It didn't get shiny on its own. Alright, we swear, this is the last time we'll mention that you've been eating insects for a good majority of your life.
Some things are not as they seem. Just like Keith Richards appears to be alive but has really been dead for years, that sugar you put on your cereal in the morning isn't really white. Or at least it doesn't start out that way.
When it starts its sweet, delicious life, sugar is brown--a color deemed to be "undesirable" by the sugar industry. Don't be such racialists, sugar industry! To make their product more acceptable to whitey, sugar companies use a filtering process to strip it of its color. In some cases, the process is a typically boring one, using ions and such. But sugar derived from sugar cane (about a quarter of the sugar in the United States) goes through a ... different process.
Domino, the largest sugar producer in America, uses bone char to filter impurities from its sugar. Bone char is delightfully produced using the bones of cows from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that have died from "natural causes," like when cows forget to wear a helmet when riding their motorcycles.
The bones are bleached in the sun and sold to marketers who then sell them to the US sugar industry after they've been used by the gelatin industry. What the gelatin industry does with the bones, we don't want to know. The bones are then heated to the point that they become a perfect means of filtering sugar.
We don't know by what alchemy this method purifies the sugar, we're certainly no scientists. But when you tell us that your purification method involves the ground-up bones of a sacrificed animal, well, we're just going to assume Satan is involved.
Carmine can also be identified on food labels as Crimson Lake, Cochineal, Natural Red 4, C.I. 75470 or E120. We mention that because we're guessing you'll want to check for it in the future after reading this.
Oh, and that thing we said about how we'd stop mentioning that you eat bugs? We totally lied. If you're eating something red right now, or if you have recently, have a gander at the label.
There is a strong chance it was made with carmine. And what's that? Are you sitting down?
Carmine is made, literally, from ground-up cochineal insects, which is just a more harrowing way of saying mashed red beetles. Because you're dying to know more, the insects are killed by exposure to heat or immersion in hot water and then dried. Because the abdomen region that houses the fertilized eggs contains the most carmine, it is separated from the rest of the body, ground into a powder and cooked at high temperatures to extract the maximum amount of color.
Then, it's added to that yogurt you ate this morning while lording your health consciousness over the guy in the cubicle next to you who had an Egg McMuffin.
Carmine: Like a bucket of blood, except more disgusting.
But the carmine terror doesn't end there. Food manufacturers are well aware that word has gotten out about exactly what carmine is and that people are less than impressed about it. So a number of crafty manufacturers have resorted to labeling it not as carmine, but instead as "natural color," thereby guaranteeing you'll never really know for sure if your cherry ice cream contains the USDA recommended amount of creepy crawlers.
Nice. Hey, speaking of that ...
When it comes to food, most of us get nervous when people are intentionally vague. We steer clear of that street vendor selling "Meat Soup" and "Food Burritos."
So when you see that a label has included "natural flavor," you should be equally alarmed. If you're thinking the "natural flavor" in your orange candy must obviously come from oranges, think again. If it was from oranges, they would say so, right on the can. It would be a selling point.
The problem is, natural flavor can, literally, be anything that isn't man made. Cat urine could be a natural flavor. If someone discovered that goat jizz added a special zing to ice cream and they could prove that eating it wouldn't make you sick ... natural flavor. We're not saying either of these are in your foods, but you get the idea.
One potentially disturbing example of natural flavor gone bad comes from, where else, McDonald's. Back in 1990, amid constant public outcry about the amount of cholesterol in their french fries, McDonald's started using pure vegetable oil in their fryers.
Wait, what were they using before? Why, beef lard. When they stopped using it, and McDonald's realized fried potatoes don't taste as good without some molten beef added, it was "natural flavor" to the rescue.
When vegetarian groups demanded to know what the mystery flavor was, company reps would only say it was "animal derived."
They wouldn't say what animal. According to the book Fast Food Nation, "Beef is the probable source, although other meats cannot be ruled out. In France, for example, fries are sometimes cooked in duck fat or horse tallow." Horse. Tallow.
Hey, nothing unnatural about that!
In 2006, the FDA approved the use of bacteriophages to fight listeria microbes on lunch meat, wieners and sausages. If you're unfamiliar with the term "bacteriophages," let us put it in a layman's term for you. Viruses.
In this case, six viruses, to be exact. There is an excellent chance that ham sandwich you had for lunch this afternoon was sprayed with a mixture of six different viruses in an effort to fight a microbe that kills hundreds of people a year. Hundreds. Approximately the same number of people that die in plane crashes. Because of this clear and present danger, your lunch meat is slathered with a buffet of viruses.
This probably sounds bad enough already, but wait until you hear Intralytix, the company that developed the bacteriophage mixture, explain exactly how the virus works. "Typical phages have hollow heads that store their viral DNA and tunnel tails with tips that bind to specific molecules on the surface of their target bacteria. The viral DNA is injected through the tail into the host cell, where it directs the production of progeny phages."
We'll take it from here. The battlefield on which this virus vs. microbe war plays out is the bologna that you used this morning to prepare your afternoon lunch. Around the same time the hollow headed bacteriophages were storming the beach at listeria, you were lifting that bologna sandwich to your mouth. Just as the phages were thrusting their hollow, viral DNA-filled tails into the host cells (also living on your sandwich), you were jamming the whole nasty battle right down your oblivious gullet.
If you've ever tried the Subway diet without success, this might be a good time to give it another shot. If thinking about the rampant virus vs. microbe violence you're about to ingest doesn't put you off eating for the rest of the day then nothing will, tubby.
Watch the BMW 5 series vs the Toyota Prius. Note that this BMW is Diesel Engine car which is usually not purchased in the US. The main point is that the Prius is actually very inefficient for a Hybrid car.
Here is another video where they floor a Prius and then the M3 keeps up behind the Prius with the same miles per gallon. Next time you see a Prius speeding ahead of you, you will know the driver is flooring the car and probably wasting the same or more gas then the car you are in.
American Apparel is not that American anymore. They are producing goods in China. According to CNBC's Made in China, American Apparel will produce goods for Chinese retail stores in China instead of USA.
How can one run Flash Player 10 on a 64 bit version of IE8?? You can't!!! Macromedia sucks and they have been aware of this issue since 10/2008 according to their own website. This is almost a year of non-support. As a result of this matter, we have sold all shares of the Adobe stock in our portfolio. This company obviously doesn't care about anyone and the profit was not justifying their greed.
sterday the world saw the disappearance of an A330 Air Frane during a trans Atlantic flight between Rio to Paris. Very ironic that a day before I got a mail of the photos taken a a passenger on a flight mins after a mid air collision, and mins before the crash of the said aircraft Two shots taken inside the plane before it crashed. Unbelievable! Photos taken inside the GOL B 737 aircraft that was involved in a mid air collision and crashed..... A B737 had a mid air collision with the Embraer Legacy while cruising at 35,000 feet over South America. The Embraer Legacy, though seriously damaged with the winglet ripped off, managed to make a landing at a nearby airstrip in the midst of the Amazon jungle. The crew and passengers of the Embraer Legacy had no idea what they had hit. The B737however crashed, killing all crew and passengers on board.The two photos attached were apparently taken by one of the passengers in the B737, just after the collision and before the aircraft crashed. The photos were retrieved from the camera's memory stick. You will never get to see photos like this. In the first photo, there is a gaping hole in the fuselage through which you can see the tailplane and vertical fin of the aircraft. In the second photo, one of the passengers is being sucked out of the gaping hole. 